


waiting for the lit sign

by rilla



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: F/M, Future Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-07
Updated: 2014-07-13
Packaged: 2018-02-07 19:11:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1910448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rilla/pseuds/rilla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Future fic. Post divorce, Zayn's at a bit of a loose end. It's probably time for one last adventure with Harry.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. uno

**Author's Note:**

> So this is a future fic, set after the end of One Direction. Title's partly based on Antilamentation by Dorianne Laux. Part one of around eight - I'll probably post one a week. Any feedback is appreciated!

Apparently divorces are a big deal when you used to be in One Direction. 

An hour after the announcement goes out, Zayn finally manages to roll himself out of bed and over to the window so he can open the curtains. For some reason he hadn’t been expecting a scrum of reporters clustered around his front gates, but they’re there anyway.

“Fuck,” he tells himself. He isn’t used to being alone in this stupid house and being able to shout whenever he likes, so he says “Fuck!” again experimentally, louder this time. Then he shouts “Fucking cunting reporters!” and pushes over a pile of jeans and feels a bit better. Then he picks the jeans back up and refolds them. Just because his wife’s left him doesn’t mean that _every_ part of his life has to go to shit.

*

“I’m shut in,” he tells Louis on the phone half an hour later. 

“You’re always shut in,” Louis points out. “Zayn Malik, hermit of Hertfordshire, that’s you.”

“Shut up,” Zayn tells him. “Like, I can’t get out. There’s all these fucking paparazzi vans shutting my drive in. I haven’t got any milk and I want some tea.”

“Have you got any lemon? El makes me have lemon in my tea sometimes. It’s quite refreshing, actually.”

“You’ve changed,” Zayn tells him darkly. 

Louis laughs delightedly, the way he always does when he thinks he’s upset someone but not too seriously. “So what are you going to do?”

“Buy a gun. No, I won’t. That was a crap thing to say. I don’t know.” Zayn edges to the window and peers out of it. Is that a news crew? He won’t be happy if there’s a news crew. It’s annoying that they’re prioritising his divorce over wars and knife crime and the ways the government’s failing the NHS. “I probably just won’t have any tea for a while,” he concludes.

“There’s my boy,” Louis says. “You know how I love your defeatist attitude. Turns me right on. Makes my dick really hard.”

“I really don’t know why I still talk to you,” Zayn tells him sternly.

“You couldn’t get rid of me.” Louis sounds self-satisfied and then, somewhere in the background, Zayn hears a baby start to roar. “Shit, Zayn. I’ve got to—”

“You go,” Zayn says, and Louis hangs up immediately. Zayn imagines him skidding over to the other side of the room and picking up Mikey, who’s six months old and will probably continue to be called ‘my little lad’ by Louis until he’s sixty. In a surprise to absolutely no one, Louis is a good dad. It’s nice to see.

Zayn had wanted kids, one day. It’s just that ‘one day’ kept getting further and further away. He’d wanted them by 24 and then he’d wanted them by 25 and now he’s 28 and neither of them wanted kids and they realised the problem wasn’t the kids thing, it was each other. And now they’re getting divorced, so really it’s probably lucky they never had kids. He’d like one though, one day. A little baby all soft hair and tiny gently grasping hands, like Liam’s got and like Louis’s got, a room decorated in duck egg blue and pale, pale yellow. One day, maybe. 

He throws another glance at the reporters outside and decides to close his curtains.

*

Niall comes round the next day. He says “It smells like feet,” disapprovingly and starts opening windows, and then he takes off his shoes so it really does smell like feet. Zayn rolls his eyes and trails after him until Niall tells him he’s acting like a sad ghost and to go and do something useful like get them a beer.

The football’s on but Niall doesn’t make him watch it, thank God. They put on Zayn’s battered old Avengers DVD instead, and when they’re four beers down Niall starts talking about Perrie, in that gentle roundabout way he’s got that makes it seem like he’s genuinely interested instead of interrogating you. He says, “The house must seem a bit weird without her, surely?” and Zayn nods.

It really does. He now has an extra one and a half wardrobes to put his things in, and three drawers full of makeup Perrie no longer wanted. He found one of her fake nails tangled up in the spare bedroom sheets when he changed them yesterday, and orangey marks on the white pillowcases from her makeup. The sheets are still sitting in the washer, casually unwashed. “It’s all right,” he says after a moment. “It’s a bit quiet, I suppose.”

Niall nods sagely. “Yeah, man. You gonna try to get her back? Bit late for that, I s’pose, now the announcement’s gone out.”

Zayn shrugs. Honestly, the announcement went out earlier than they’d wanted, because some fan had been cruising by their house and saw a removal van leaving and then Perrie looking a bit pink and weepy, so they’d had to get it out before they started getting hounded even more. Sometimes confirming things makes people shut up about them. He wishes it’d make people fuck off from outside his door though. He likes being a hermit when it suits him, not because he’s too chicken shit to drive through a crowd of people. Maybe he should do what Niall did, which is to park several houses down the road and then tramp experimentally through some back gardens. He accidentally tramped through a lot of puddles though, which is probably why his feet smell like some cheese died on them.

“Probably not,” he concedes after a moment. “Like, I’m not angry at her, but. You know.”

Niall’s watching him with his face screwed up a bit, thoughtful lines at the corners of his eyes. “I don’t know, actually,” he says gently. “You haven’t talked to any of us about it.”

“I’ve talked to Danny and Ant,” Zayn tells him. Except Danny and Ant are in Bradford with their families and they can’t really get away, and his own family are all a bit irritated with him because they really liked Perrie and for some reason they keep thinking it was all his fault when he’s actually fairly certain it was both of them.

“Good for you,” Niall says, sounding doubtful. “But, you know. The lads.”

Zayn hmms at him. He isn’t sure what good talking to the lads would have done. Eleanor’s just gone back to work and she and Louis are determined not to have any help so Louis is stuck with the baby most of the time, so he’s out of the question. Liam’s pretty busy because he’s in the middle of recording his album of Gary Barlow-esque ballads, and anyway he’s got to juggle that with Sophia and the girls. And Harry’s… fuck knows where Harry is, actually. It’s been a while for Zayn and Harry.

Maybe he should have spoken to Niall, though. He’ll concede that now. 

He smiles, which makes Niall look slightly alarmed. “Why are you doing that with your face? Are you going to be sick?” he asks.

“I’m smiling,” Zayn says irritatedly.

“That was not a fucking smile. At best, it was a zombie impersonation.”

“It was a smile. Jesus. I – shut the fuck up, Niall. We should go out one night.”

Niall brightens at that. “Mate! Absolutely. That’d be class. Where?”

“Anywhere,” Zayn says fervently, and means it.

*

Another thing about having been in One Direction, other than the fact that people take too much interest in your divorce, is that you’re used to having someone on hand with non-disclosure forms whenever you have a casual shag. Admittedly it’s been a while since he’s done it – years, since he got better at that whole fidelity thing – and as it turns out he’s a bit rusty at it.

Girls still fall all over themselves to get to him and Niall, which is both gratifying and suffocating. One girl bleats “I’m so sorry about Perrie!” and then starts kissing his neck, and her friend, who looks a bit bored and pissed off, shouts “Who are these two guys?”

Niall laughs at that and then makes a visible decision to try to pull her. It doesn’t take him long, as Zayn bats her friend away. They’re in the VIP section, because they got herded into it, and he feels like there should be rules against girls running their fingernails along your inner thigh if you’re not really that into it. Now he’s out, he’s starting to miss Perrie more than ever, which is weird because in their house he was mostly okay. He keeps seeing clouds of blonde hair and thinking it’s her, or noticing echoes of her in the way that girls are moving their hips as they dance in the middle of the club. He remembers the carefree way she used to laugh with her whole body, and texts her, _Miss u x x x_. He gets a message back that says _Don’t be a wally, now just get on with your life aha xxx_. Yeah, that’s fair. 

The girl gets bored after a while, and he sinks back into his seat, sucks down his drink and then another one that’s handed to him by someone who seems to know what they’re doing. He texts Louis and Liam and Ant and Danny and his sisters and a couple of his cousins, and doesn’t get any responses, which makes him feel a bit shit. He considers putting his phone away, because that’s not really what you go on nights out for, but then he finds his Sudoku app and starts playing on that instead. Niall shouts in his ear “What the fuck are you doing, man?” and Zayn scowls at him until he goes away again. The girl – he needs to learn her name, God, he’s a horrible person – is laughing with someone else and flicking her hair around. He knows she’s trying to get his attention and it’s so obvious it’s barely even fun, but it’s half working anyway.

He ends up taking her home with him, because of course he does. She’s fit and she’s got nice boobs and she seems to like him, as Niall pointed out when Zayn shouted at him to ask his opinion about what he should do. For tonight that’s enough. He doesn’t realise how bizarre it is to be fucking another girl in his and Perrie’s bed until after it’s over, and then it’s pretty hard to get to sleep. Sarah – that’s her name – sucks his dick in the morning and then he calls her a cab and she goes home, to Tooting or Lambeth, or wherever. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t really care either. He just goes back to sleep for a few hours, and somehow when he wakes up the world is still the same.

*

It ends up in The Mirror, because of course it does. Louis’s spent the best part of the last few years antagonising them, and Zayn’s PR company points out, “We’ve got to give them something now the story’s out there” when Zayn asks if they can’t just pay off the paper. Apparently it’s a big story, Zayn Malik’s first post-divorce announcement shag. The story’s complimentary, mostly, although it says he’s got ‘sad eyes’ and there are still pictures of Perrie all over his house, which makes him sound like a massive loser. There _are_ pictures of Perrie in his house as it happens, because what was he supposed to do? Find them all and incinerate them? It’s not like they hate each other, it’s just that they shouldn’t be married to each other. There’s a massive difference. ‘Sad eyes’, though. That’s a bit of a fucking cheek. He’s not Liam, for Christ’s sake.

More news crews turn up outside his house. Louis brings the baby over for a while and yells loudly at the paps trying to get pictures of him. It’s a pretty good afternoon: Mikey’s on solid food now and takes great delight in splattering Zayn’s kitchen in something orange, which Louis apologises for and diligently cleans, because apparently the unthinkable’s happened and Louis has finally grown up. When they’re all sprawled on the sofas, Mikey asleep on Louis’s lap like a sleepy puppy, Louis patting his back gently, Zayn says: “Do you think that story made me sound like a wanker?”

“Getting laid after you get divorced?” Louis makes a face. “No. Makes you sound a bit less pathetic.”

“I’m not pathetic,” Zayn tells him, but Louis just laughs knowingly. 

“The thing is,” Louis says then, after a moment, “I thought you two would be together forever.”

It hits Zayn then, like someone’s reached right behind his ribcage and scooped out his heart. “Me too,” he says, his lips half numb.

“It’s good you did what was best for you though, mate,” Louis says, like he’s trying to be invigorating. “Like, if you weren’t happy, what’s the point?”

“It was nice not having it in the papers when I had sex,” Zayn says. “That’s a start.”

Louis grins, but his eyes are full of pity. It’s terrible. It makes Zayn want to throw something at his head so he stops making that horrible face, except he’s holding Mikey so he can’t. Louis being nice to you is the final straw. Louis being nice to you means you’re really, really fucked. He feels a bit like he’s about to start crying. “Maybe I should phone her,” he says, a bit desperate. “Ask her to come back. She might do, you know. She’s not angry with me. There wasn’t any cheating or anything like that.”

“Do you want to be married to her?” Louis asks, and then, when Zayn’s silent for a second too long, he says, “Well, there we go.”

*

Life goes on, even though it feels like it shouldn’t. The news crews go away eventually, and it seems like people stop caring as much. It’s nice. He adds to his graffiti room and buys a new sofa online. It turns out to be weirdly uncomfy so he has to send it back again, but it’s the thought that counts. The lads manage to come round one night, Louis and Liam and Niall, all at the same time and minus kids for once. They all drink too much and laugh so much that Zayn ends up with a splitting headache, and then they all pass out one by one around his living room, Liam and Louis sprawled over the corner sofa, Niall on the recliner, Zayn on the squashy armchair. 

He wakes up at 4AM and feels so awful in his head and his heart and his stomach that he thinks he’s going to have to go and be sick, but he swallows that feeling down and closes his eyes for a moment longer. When he opens them again it’s half five and the sky outside is brightening, and the lads are still asleep. He picks his way through pizza boxes and beer bottles to the porch outside, and lights a cigarette and watches the day begin. He thinks about that time he and Perrie went to New York and watched the sun rise from the balcony of their hotel room, and before he knows it he’s crying, one hand over his face, his cigarette half-smoked and smouldering by his side. There are footsteps behind him and it’s Louis, his sharp face softened by sleep, and he slings an arm around Zayn’s shoulder and presses the side of his head against Zayn’s, and Liam takes his cigarette and stubs it out for him and stands next to him shoulder to shoulder like he’s Batman and Zayn’s Gotham and Liam will protect him until he dies, and then Niall comes out and hugs him easily, arms looping around him.

“It’ll get better,” one of them says, Liam, but if that was true it seems like it would have happened already.

*

The next few weeks are strange. Zayn thinks a lot about going out but in the end he usually decides it’s a better idea to stay inside. He goes out in the garden and pulls up some weeds and some things he thinks are weeds but are probably actually flowers, and that’s just about it. He orders his groceries online and signs up for a special delivery service where you get boxes of fresh vegetables delivered right to your door, which sounds extremely handy while he’s looking through the website but more impractical when he’s standing in his kitchen wondering what to do with purple carrots and bunched beetroot, so he just orders pizza instead and leaves the vegetables to rot in his fridge.

He reads a lot, and takes care of the dogs and cats, and although he’s scheduled to go to a couple of things he decides it’s probably best not to. He doesn’t want to read about his sad eyes again and he absolutely categorically doesn’t want Perrie to see stuff like that. He sees pictures of her coming out of Mahiki with some guy Zayn doesn’t know, so he goes through everyone she’s following on Twitter until he finds him, and then he goes through his twitpics and tweets and Instagram pictures trying to figure out if he’s straight or not. The result’s inconclusive, and Zayn’s blistering with something which he thinks might be jealousy. He doesn’t even know what he’s jealous of, whether it’s the fact someone might be shagging Perrie or the fact she might be happy. He certainly doesn’t feel happy, but she looks it. It’s not really fair, that’s the thing. They both decided to get divorced, so surely they should get over it at the same rate.

Things like getting dressed and having showers, they all start to get insurmountably hard. He’s always been the sort of person who likes to sit on his sofa unless there’s someone telling him not to, but it’s easy to let that increase when he’s by himself. Danny and Ant still don’t come down to visit even though they said they would, and his big sister’s busy with the kids and his little sisters are busy with uni and his mum and dad – well, he’s not entirely honest with them. He’s always liked his mum and dad to think he’s completely fine, even when he might not be. Niall fucks off to LA to write for a while, after asking Zayn about eighty times if he minds, and Liam comes over when he can and so does Louis, but Zayn doesn’t think he’s particularly good company. They both just do strange fake smiles anyway and go around opening curtains and getting the hoover out and asking him why he’s got so many gone-off vegetables in his recycling bin. Really it’s no fun for anyone, least of all him.

He draws a lot, which is good, and paints too. He also spends a while looking at his Perrie tattoo and wondering what to do about it. When he asks the boys Louis just says “You shouldn’t have got it anyway!” sternly, which is really unhelpful, and Liam looks sorrowful and then suggests tentatively “You could tattoo her hair dark and pretend it’s your sister?” because he’s thick, is Liam, but he’s lovely so it’s all right. Niall emails him a string of emails with suggestions like “make her into an alien” and “laser it off!” and then he rings too late at night when Zayn’s already gone to bed and says, “Look, mate, you really liked her and she was a big part of your life, so just keep it for now, yeah?” which is probably the best advice he’s had so far. 

*

It’s July, almost, and the sun’s coming out. The days are starting to get long and languid and it makes him think of touring, of the buses that were too cold or too hot all the time, of the tiny bunk that he hunkered down in, getting through the nights with his bones shaking, gentle and resolute. It makes him think of smoking pot with Louis and playing video games with Liam, drinking beer with Niall and escaping with Harry. That used to be their thing, the two of them, for a while. They’d get lost together, get fresh tattoos, draw on each other, go to a club and get back late, all glitter and slicked hair and gleaming sweat, Harry’s pupils so dilated it was like his eyes were black. In the old days they’d share rooms, the two of them. Share girls too, sometimes. Harry was the first boy he saw come, outside porn. Fucking on opposite beds, eye contact at the worst possible moments. They never talked about it really but he still remembers the pale curve of Harry’s back, the muscles in his arms, his hair sweaty and soft.

It’s funny, the Harry thing. But it comes back to escaping. At the end of the day, Harry was always the instigator. Zayn was just along for the ride. And then Perrie happened, and life happened, and things drifted, and Harry escaped for real, to New York, or LA, or wherever.

It’s not a big deal. Zayn isn’t upset about it or anything. But it’s something he thinks about in the months after Perrie leaves and his divorce goes through, when he’s wondering about his life and how to restructure it and if he knows how to do it. His dreams are littered with Perrie and her blonde hair and her easy laugh, and Louis and his sharp white teeth, and Liam and his crinkly eyes, and the soft patter of Niall’s guitar, and Harry, Harry, always Harry, his face shadowed under his stupid hats and his shirts open halfway down his chest, with Mick Jagger on the phone and Taylor Swift on his dick, his voice slow and drawling, a low burr that curls around the ends of the summer nights until Zayn wakes up too hot, duvet tangled around him, sweat cooling on the back of his neck.

*

“Have you gone mental?” Louis asks him on the phone. “Niall said I had to ring you because he thinks you’ve gone mental.”

“I don’t think I’ve gone mental?” Zayn says. “Maybe. I don’t know.” He suddenly realises he’s been wearing the same t-shirt on and off for a week and a half and that he smells a bit, but to be fair he did that before Perrie left him too.

“Do you want me to come over?” Louis asks, and Zayn realises suddenly that he’s genuinely concerned. That’s not okay. He would quite like to see Louis though, so he makes a grumbly noise of assent, and Louis says “I’m just going to strap Mikey in!” before abruptly hanging up. 

Zayn makes himself get off the sofa and has a desultory shower before finding some clean clothes. He puts on some jeans and suddenly realised he’s lost weight despite the fact he’s been sitting around doing a whole lot of nothing, which unfortunately backs up Niall’s ‘Zayn’s gone mental’ hypothesis. He puts on a belt and considers shaving for a while before deciding not to. He’ll just have a beard forever. He’s heard that hermits are supposed to have beards anyway. He doesn’t mind playing up to the stereotype, just this once.

The doorbell goes before Zayn’s expecting it to. He hasn’t even got out the takeaway menus yet. When he opens the door he’s expecting to see Louis wrangling Mikey like he’s a recalcitrant, slippery rugby ball, but instead he sees Harry. He’s aware that his face registers shock for a moment and then he makes a face at him, shows his teeth like he’s snarling and says “What are you doing here?”

Harry’s wearing skinny jeans and a white t-shirt that looks soft and washed out, which means it probably came like that and cost him four hundred pounds. Zayn can see the blurred dark outline of the butterfly on his chest, and he’s wearing these boots that are pitifully battered and stupid. He’s also wearing the shittest cowboy hat in the world, and he takes it off, holds it down by his side like he’s in Brokeback Mountain, like he’s Heath in mourning for Jake, and then he leans in and wraps his arms around Zayn tightly.

“I’m sorry about Perrie,” he says into Zayn’s ear. He smells like stale aeroplanes and dirty hair and expensive cologne, and it makes Zayn’s chest do something weird, like it’s going over a speedbump too fast. “Are you okay?”

“It was a while ago now,” Zayn says, disentangling himself. He helps Harry shift his suitcase and rucksack inside into the hallway, and gets him a beer. Harry doesn’t go round opening curtains and windows, which is nice. He just leans on Zayn’s kitchen counter and then grabs a red pepper out of his fridge and starts eating it like it’s an apple. Zayn had kind of forgotten that he did stuff like that. 

“So you’re really okay?” Harry asks, before making a face and picking a seed off his tongue, flicking it into the sink. “I was going to come back earlier but Liam said you were okay.”

“That’s because I _am_ okay,” Zayn tells him patiently.

“Clearly,” Harry says. Zayn can’t tell whether he’s being sarcastic or not so he just narrows his eyes and drinks some of his beer. After a moment Harry says: “I’ve been in New Zealand.”

“Yeah?” Zayn asks. He’s lost his enthusiasm for travelling since they stopped touring. The inside of hotel rooms look a lot like the inside of other hotel rooms, and he got tired of being swarmed by people no matter where he went. They don’t do that in Borehamwood. No one gives a shit in Borehamwood. 

“I did the hobbit trail,” Harry says, sounding too enthusiastic. “It was… it was pretty cool, actually. It was really funny. I met someone who gave me a blowie outside the X Factor studios when I was sixteen.”

“That’s… gross?” Zayn ventures.

“Groupies are allowed to go to New Zealand to find themselves too,” Harry says thoughtfully. “Anyway, it was really cool. I was in Thailand before that. I went to a full moon party. Covered myself in neon shit and had some mushrooms. It was sick. Everything was dancing.”

“Right.” Zayn rubs his thumb around the top of his beer bottle. “I’m glad you had a good time.”

“Yeah,” Harry says, and flashes him a smile. “Thanks. Anyway, I was just wondering – do you want to go somewhere with me?”

Zayn blinks at him and then he says: “What?”

“I know you don’t really like going places,” Harry says, faster than usual. “But I thought a change of scene might do you good. And I like going to places and I can show you somewhere I’ve already been, or we could go somewhere new, or—”

“Somewhere new,” Zayn says. His heart’s doing the weird speedbump thing again. “We could do that.”

“Yeah?” Harry looks at him for a moment, and then this smile spreads across his face. Suddenly he’s sixteen again and they’ve signed their first deal, and he’s seventeen and in love with Caroline and thinks it’ll be forever, and eighteen and playing to arenas. He’s got the pinkest mouth Zayn’s ever seen, and then he’s twenty-seven with deeper lines around his eyes and a nose that’s peeling from sunburn and he’s got dirty hands with a load of rings shoved on all his fingers and stupid raggy things tied around his wrists, and he’s so… he’s so fucking Harry still, after all these years.

“Yeah,” Zayn says. He likes the sound of it somehow. Leaving his house, leaving Perrie’s old copies of Elle and Cosmo, her engagement ring he’s still got in his desk drawer, his purple hoodie she liked to wear around the house. Escaping with Harry. He could do that, one last time.


	2. dos

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Harry and Zayn go on their first adventure in years.

Louis comes round about half an hour after Harry arrives. He’s got Mikey on one arm along with his usual big bag full of slightly smelly baby things like nappies and wipes, and when he sees Harry’s suitcases in the hall he stops in his tracks and frowns sharply. “Where is he?” he asks, not sounding entirely happy.

“In the garden.” Zayn isn’t sure if he’s pleased Louis is there or not. On the one hand, he and Harry have had a bit of a fractious relationship in recent years, and there’s a chance Louis might be about to do some serious shouting, but on the other hand Mikey’s very sweet, so really it’s a toss-up.

“Why is he here?” Louis asks. His lips are doing a strange tight thing. It’s not great. Mikey lets out a worried burbling noise.

“Because I got divorced,” Zayn says, which just makes Louis sigh at him, so he adds “I think he wanted to see if I’m okay. Which I am, by the way.”

“So you’ve told me eighty million times,” Louis says, sounding world weary. He shifts Mikey around and then he goes into the kitchen so he can see out of the back window. It’s sunny outside and Harry is sprawled on the middle of Zayn’s lawn like an ungainly starfish in pointy boots. Zayn thinks he might be asleep, or dead, maybe. Probably asleep. Louis sighs at him. “So what sage words of advice did he give you? Did he make everything all right?”

“Everything _is_ all right,” Zayn points out. Then Louis looks like he’s about to blow a fuse so he goes on quickly, “We’re going to go somewhere, me and him. Like, somewhere we haven’t been to before.”

“We’ve been everywhere,” Louis says absently, still looking out at Harry. Then he hands Mikey over to Zayn and says, “Let me just have a tiny word with him,” before flicking his hair off his forehead and stamping outside.

Zayn mostly just stays at the window to watch, with Mikey clinging onto him like a baby monkey. He’s got Louis’s blue eyes and Eleanor’s easy-going temperament, which is lucky for everyone who comes into contact with him. Probably a baby with Louis’s personality would drive everyone in a twenty-foot vicinity completely mental. When Harry sees Louis he stretches out his arms for a hug, except Louis ignores him and seems to go into a long ranty thing that involves lots of gesticulating towards Zayn’s house and scoffing at what Harry’s trying to say. Zayn’s kitchen window is open so he catches a few of the more hysterical snippets, like when Louis shouts “Have you seen him lately? He looks like he’s homeless,” which is rude, and then when the conversation’s drawing to a close he says “I just don’t want you to fuck him over.”

It’s annoying, kind of. Zayn’s divorced and not all that great at leaving his house these days, but he’s not an idiot or a child. He can absolutely take care of himself. And Harry is the sort of person who just bumbles along being nice to people. Louis is the one who says things to provoke reactions, or to be cruel on purpose. Zayn doesn’t mind that side of him because it’s hilarious but it is a bit of a cheek to tell Harry what to do. He can’t bring himself to be actively pissed off though, like he would have been a while ago. It’s like tennis balls thudding against a brick wall every time something happens that should make him feel something – he’s aware it’s happened but at the same time it has absolutely no effect on him. He thinks it might be the sort of thing his friends are worried about, but at the same time he can’t really bring himself to care.

Louis marches back inside with Harry trailing after him. “This holiday sounds nice!” he says with brittle enthusiasm.

Harry’s twisting one of his rings nervously. “I’m going to make you some pasta,” he says to Zayn, “and then we’re going to look online and choose somewhere to go, okay?”

“What fun,” Louis says, and snatches Mikey back.

*

When Harry asks him where he’d like to go, Zayn initially says “I don’t mind,” but then he realises that actually he does mind quite a lot. When Harry suggests Australia he feels something tighten in his chest at how far away it is, and he feels the same way about Bali too. Singapore makes him feel like he’ll be stuck in a city the whole time and he’s too scared of vague political things he’s heard to go to Russia. Paris is too touristy and Venice is too watery. Edinburgh is too close and Argentina is too far away. They narrow it down to Europe, and he doesn’t feel like going to Germany and he doesn’t know anything that’s in Belgium other than chocolate, which is one of many things on his mental list of doom that reminds him of Perrie. Croatia’s supposed to be nice but he’s worried about not being able to understand any Croatian. Prague is full of stag parties and anyway he doesn’t want to go to a big city. 

The thing is, he doesn’t actually say any of this out loud to Harry, so he just ends up making a face and saying “Nehh,” whenever Harry suggests somewhere.

After a while Harry looks up from his laptop and says, “Zayn, maybe you should look yourself, instead.”

Zayn shrugs and sits down, with Harry hovering behind him like an anxious oversized moth wearing too many necklaces. He clicks around for a while, through French cities and seaside towns, and through Spain too. He thinks of traditional holiday resorts and feels a bit sick at the idea of lying beside a pool, no matter how expensive or luxurious the hotel is. All those families flapping around. It sounds terrible. He’d like to be in a smallish city, somewhere that people actually live in instead of just go on holiday to, where no one will talk to him and he can buy ice cream as frequently as he likes, and where he can get home from extremely quickly if he really wants to, which at some point he probably will.

He says vaguely to Harry, “I’d like to be able to get home fast,” and although Harry sighs a bit, he also nods and says “What about the south of France?”

Zayn makes a face. “With all the famous people?”

“You _are_ a famous person,” Harry says. “You know that, right? Someone told you at some point?”

Zayn makes another face at him, and Harry doesn’t even roll his eyes in return. Instead he says: “What about northern Spain?”

Zayn does some more clicking and decides that might be okay, so Harry shoulders him out of the way and books flights and finds an apartment superhumanly quickly. All of a sudden, just like that, it’s arranged. Harry’s talking breezily at him about how they can get a cab to the airport the day after tomorrow and how it won’t be too hot but it’ll be nice and warm and breezy, and how the place they’re going to has a huge fiesta at the end of July and won’t that be wicked, and then he starts telling a story about how one time when he was little he almost got auctioned off at a local fair and Gemma had to rescue him. It’s not related but it makes Zayn feel less like his head’s spinning with panic. Harry was always good at that.

*

He goes to bed early that night, after pointing Harry into his spare room, because Harry has never been all that great at going home to his own house. He’s half asleep when he suddenly remembers he’s going to Spain for an indeterminate amount of time in two days, so he puts on some clothes and marches into the spare bedroom to tell Harry they have to cancel it because it’s all a horrible idea.

“Steady on,” Harry says, putting down Zayn’s copy of Catch-22. “What’s all this about?”

Zayn’s about to tell him. He’s about to go into the spiel that he thought out about it being a terrible shitty idea and how he doesn’t need to go anywhere and how people keep thinking he isn’t okay when he actually is and how he likes his house and he doesn’t want to leave it to go anywhere, particularly not with Harry, who left over and over again. Every time the band had a break he fucked off to LA, every time they had a day off between gigs he spent the whole time with Lou instead of with the rest of them. Just because Harry deals with stuff by fucking off doesn’t mean that Zayn does too. 

The thing is, it’s something about the way that Harry looks. He’s lying there on Zayn’s spare bed in his black pants with a book in his hand, and he’s finally taken off all his jewellery, which is lying in a bright silver heap on the bedside table. He’s got slight tan lines on his arms and around his neck and he’s got new tattoos that Zayn doesn’t recognise. His hair’s all wild and stupid and overgrown and his gangly brown legs are crossed at the ankle. He’s got long bony feet just like his long bony hands, and a wide, expressive mouth. Zayn thinks of Harry at seventeen, on the bed across from him with a girl they didn’t know. He remembers seeing Harry bite her nipple, teasing and sharp, so at odds with his usual sweetness. He remembers fucking his girl harder to make up for it.

“I wanted to say good night,” he says instead.

Harry nods a bit, eyes wide, and then he puts his book down and says “All right. Good night, Zayn. Why don’t you stay in here tonight?”

“What?” Zayn says. “Are you insane?” except he does anyway, of course.

*

He wakes up first, trails downstairs to find some food before Harry joins him, tousle-haired and yawning and apparently completely forgiving of the fact that Zayn is a duvet hog. They make lists and wash all Harry’s clothes and repack them in his old battered suitcase. Zayn doesn’t bother packing anything until later that night, when Harry stands in his doorway and tells him what to put in his bag because he swears he won’t let Zayn steal all his things like he did when they were younger and on tour. For his part, Zayn doesn’t really want to wear Harry’s skin tight jeans or raggy flannel shirts. The day speeds by too quickly, Louis pops by to take all the animals to look after despite the fact that apparently Eleanor’s going to ‘fucking kill’ him when she finds out, and then somehow Zayn’s in bed – his own, tonight – and waiting to go on an adventure with Harry.

It’s more than a little terrifying. He feels like he was married for so long that he’s forgotten how to do things by himself, even though he knows Harry will be there so he won’t be totally alone. But Harry usually prowls off and makes new friends and that’s actually welcome sometimes, when Zayn wants to curl into a corner and stick his headphones on and forget about the world, but right now it seems daunting. 

It’s even more daunting the next day when they’re at the airport and Harry’s standing there in ripped skinny jeans and a straw hat, having the temerity to look at the flight departures board with a bit of a frown and one hand on his hip, as though he’s a totally normal person. It’s kind of fun, to watch the Harry Styles effect; Zayn had forgotten this, in the many precautions he’s taken over the years to make sure that people don’t notice him or figure out who he is. Harry stands there, and people fall at his feet. As ever, he bravely manages to take it on the chin. He takes pictures with people as Zayn steps back, pulling his beanie down further over his forehead, fiddling with his rucksack strap. It still isn’t long before a girl breathes “Oh my God, it’s Zayn too,” and he finds himself in the centre of a crowd of flashes too, over-excited girls, a few mums and brothers who should know better. It’s been a while since this happened, thanks to his best efforts, but he smiles anyway before they’re ushered away and pushed through security before everyone else.

Their flight is mostly full of Spanish people, and they don’t seem to notice the two of them. Harry notices Zayn making a face at their cramped seats, and says over-seriously, “EasyJet doesn’t have first class. Sorry, your highness.” Zayn shoves him and he almost falls over, which serves him right.

Every time he flies he remembers that he doesn’t really like flying. It’s fine, he isn’t afraid he’s going to die any more, but he’s still relieved when Harry prods him awake and they’re almost there. He leans over Harry to look out of the window; it’s greener than he remembers Spain being, he thinks as the plane curls inland, a patchwork of fields, green and gold and brown, and then he closes his eyes tight as they land, bouncing once off the runway.

The airport is small and it doesn’t smell like England, but no one seems to recognise them, despite the way Harry’s leaning over to shake out his curls and then carefully reties a strip of purple fabric around his head, like he’s the star of whatever show’s playing in his weird little head. They take a cab into the centre of the city, which doesn’t actually take all that long. The sky doesn’t look like the Spain that Zayn remembers from touring, from taking Perrie on holiday that time, when they’d spent all day lying by the pool and on the beach, fucking all night, sleeping through the morning before making it out of bed in time for lunch; it’s heavy and grey, and the air is humid, almost oppressive. He gets out his phone and thinks about texting her to tell her he’s in Spain, that Harry’s taken him away, but then he puts it away again. She’s probably enjoying her day with someone else. She doesn’t need to be reminded of her mental ex-husband right now. And anyway there’s Harry beside him, handing over a map he picked up from the airport, reading bits out of his guidebook, nudging Zayn and trying to make him laugh, his white smile so close, Zayn palming his face and pushing him away, Harry laughing even more.

He has a cigarette as Harry collects their keys, and then they drag their cases down a tiled hallway and up some stairs. The apartment is fine: two bedrooms, a shared bathroom with no bath and a bright white shower cubicle instead, a kitchen with a Tupperware container of cutlery and some half-used condiments in the fridge. There’s a living room too, with a long squashy sofa and two overstuffed armchairs. It’s pretty basic, and it’s not all that big either, especially not compared to Zayn’s house at home. But his house is pretty far out of London and this is slap bang in the middle of the city, and also, his house cost four million pounds and this one probably didn’t, so whatever. This will absolutely do. 

“How long are we here for, anyway?” he asks Harry, throwing his case indiscriminately into one of the bedrooms.

Harry shrugs, looking nonplussed for the first time since they’ve got there. “I don’t know,” he says. “As long as it takes.”

*

Zayn sleeps for part of the afternoon, curled up on his bed like a puppy, and when he wakes up he can hear Harry thumping gently around in the kitchen next door. It’s the first time in a while that he’s woken up to the sounds of someone else living their life in the same building as him. It’s nice. He gets up, goes through to the kitchen and Harry’s there, in the middle of concocting himself a huge sandwich. “I went to the shops,” he says, and then nods at the fridge. Zayn opens it, grabs some cheese and orange juice and rips some bread off the loaf on the counter. He sits across from Harry at their small kitchen table and says “What do we do now?”

“Whatever you want,” Harry says, shrugging, and then adds, “Eat this,” and holds out a piece of tomato.

“Did you drop it?” Zayn asks, narrowing his eyes.

“What?”

“Fine.” Zayn eats it. It’s excellent, much nicer than the tomatoes he gets in his special vegetable delivery box at home, but he’s not going to admit that aloud. “So how come you don’t know what we do now? I thought you were really good at this travelling stuff.”

Harry laughs a bit then, picks up a bit of cheese from the table top and inspects it before eating it. “I’m all right at it. I move around a lot though. I don’t usually just rent a flat for a month. This is your trip, not mine.”

Zayn raises his eyebrows sceptically. “All right then.”

“We could go to the tourist office,” Harry suggests.

“I keep forgetting what this city’s even called.”

“Santiago de Compostela.”

“What’s here?”

“There’s a cathedral. You can see it from the balcony. It’s nice.”

“A cathedral?” 

Harry must be able to hear scepticism in Zayn’s voice because he laughs, and then he gets up and flings open the kitchen window, which stretches from ceiling to floor. It’s slatted, which explains why Zayn didn’t actually notice that their balcony exists before now, and yeah, okay, there’s the cathedral. The sky’s cleared now and it’s a deep, sweet shade of blue, the sun pale and heavy above him, and the city laid out like it’s made of gold. The cathedral hums brightly ahead of them, magnificent towers bursting up from the white and terracotta rooftops around it, all sharp elegant lines and graceful curves.

“Maybe I should have brought my paints,” Zayn mumbles, and Harry laughs a bit, joins him in the window properly, sandwich in hand. He leans against Zayn’s side, so companionable that it hurts a bit. Since when can they be friends, when Harry left over and over again, when the second he comes back all he has to do is flash his green eyes and Zayn’s getting on a plane for him, to go God knows where? He doesn’t know if they were ever really friends, let alone now when everything’s so stupid and fucked up.

He steps out onto the balcony, which is bigger than usual, a long tiled floor almost the same size as the kitchen, hemmed in by black railings. There are a couple of half dead, dusty-looking plants in one corner and a white plastic set of tables and chairs. For a second he imagines Perrie out there on a sun lounger, her skin as smooth as cream and as sweet as strawberries, her hair scooped up on the top of her head, reading bits out from her magazine and making Zayn listen to it. She used to make him talk even when he didn’t feel like, carefully cajoled it out of him, used to listen to him carefully in a way that the other boys often didn’t. Louis has a habit of talking over you, Niall gets distracted halfway through a sentence, Liam tries to focus but often fails. Harry was probably the best out of them; when you’ve got his attention you can really feel it, his eyes on you like a weight, his brow wrinkled, endearingly froggy. Zayn remembers those shared rooms, late night conversations, sitting on the balcony, making sure Harry was out of the way of his cigarette smoke as he exhaled into the night sky, talking until the sun started to streak through the sky and the moon slowly dimmed. Things went a bit weird after he got engaged. A lot went a bit weird after that, actually.

“S’nice,” he says over his shoulder, catching a look on Harry’s face that he doesn’t quite understand before Harry grins, big and happy, and comes outside to join him.

*

They go out for a walk after that. Harry holds the map out in front of him like he’s Joey from Friends and he’s about to have to step into it. Zayn considers suggesting that they use their phones like normal people, but Harry seems to be enjoying not knowing where he’s going, so for now he just leaves it. After a while Harry just rolls the map up and shoves it in his pocket, and they follow the spires that tilt up to the sky, on their way to the cathedral. The streets are narrow and lined with cafes, bars, an occasional little shop that Zayn doesn’t particularly want to go into. Finally they twist down a passageway and the narrow street ripples and broadens like a miracle into a huge square. It’s lined with old buildings, pretty official looking and old and beautiful, and on their right stands the cathedral.

“Sick,” Harry says fervently. 

Zayn feels like he’s glued to the spot but Harry moves forward, gets his phone out and starts taking pictures of the buildings, the sky, the people around them. There are tourists milling around but no one seems to be looking at them, and for the first time in God knows how long Zayn feels blissfully normal. The cathedral’s pretty immense. He doesn’t know shit about architecture but it’s complicated and impressive and ornate, with iron-railed steps leading up to its doors. Around the square people are moving around, taking pictures of the various buildings, or just sitting cross-legged on the floor like they’re taking it all in.

“Sick,” Zayn echoes, more quietly.

He gets his phone out too, takes a couple of pictures before putting it away again, following Harry right out into the centre of the square, where the paving crosses in the middle. To their right there are two guys with deep tans and dirty hair and ragged shorts who are lying in the shade, heads on their packs, unlaced walking boots sprawled on the ground next to them.

“Pilgrims,” Harry says, nodding at them.

“Pilgrims?” 

“Yeah. For the saint, or something.”

Zayn narrows his eyes at Harry and decides it’s best to leave that one for the time being.

“The camino, you twat,” Harry goes on. “You’ve heard of the camino, right?”

“Obviously. If you’ll just remind me what exactly it is?”

Harry laughs and nudges him before slinging an arm over Zayn’s shoulders. “I’ll read up on it for you and then I’ll tell you,” he says easily. He’s got a little bird tattooed on his hand that Zayn doesn’t recognise, and he touches it gently. It’s a lot smaller than the bird Zayn’s got on his hand, it’s just a tiny little bird that’s lost in flight, wings outstretched. It looks like it’s in motion. “Like it?” Harry says, his voice a little lower.

“It’s all right,” Zayn says, letting go. Then he nudges his hip gently into Harry’s so he lets go of him, although if he’s honest, there are worse things to have draped over your back than Harry Styles. 

“Come on,” Harry says, stepping away, and Zayn follows him, because this is what always used to happen. Harry would make a move and Zayn would follow him, would keep up with every drink and then take an extra shot just to prove he could. Harry would pull, would drag a girl back to the hotel, Zayn would do the same, would find a girl with a nicer arse, bigger tits, just so he could smile at Harry with the appropriate amount of blankness the next morning. No envy here. No competition. He doesn’t know what exactly the knotted feeling in his chest was, really.

They go to the edge of the square, half behind one of the buildings that cuts away to reveal the rest of the town in a sort of valley, a low stone railing around the edge. The city stretches out towards lush green hills behind, spiky with trees, and Zayn feels – for a second, his chest feels less empty. The air is clearer here. Perrie’s absence is conspicuous but at least this is a place that they never went to together. It’s not the cool sheets on the other side of the bed, it’s not the dogs whining at him like they’re asking where she is, it’s not her black silk jacket crushed and forgotten behind his on the coat rack, her perfume still clinging to it. Sometimes he feels like he's mourning her like she's dead instead of on the other side of London.

“You all right?” Harry asks, and when Zayn nods Harry’s face visibly brightens and he goes over to the railing and leans over it. The sky has started to darken now, the bright blue dimming, shot through with pale orange and swimming with violet. Even the trees along the horizon look like they’re breathing as they delicately crack the land from the sky.

“What do you want to do tomorrow?” Harry asks, turning, leaning against the railing.

“I don’t want to go to hospital with you. Get away from there, idiot,” Zayn says, and Harry grins, takes a couple of steps obediently away from the edge. “I don’t know what’s here,” Zayn admits then, after a moment. “Walk around, maybe. What do you want to do?”

“Maybe,” Harry suggests, “we could go out tomorrow night?”

“Out out?” Zayn asks, his pulse starting to race.

“Out out,” Harry confirms, “like we used to.”

“Exactly like we used to?” Zayn says, half challenging.

Harry just laughs, the little silver threads running through the scarf tied round his head glittering in the fading sunlight as he moves his head. “Maybe,” he says, throwaway, like it’s casual, even though Zayn knows it isn’t. “I told you before. This is your trip, not mine. You make the choices.”

Zayn looks at him hard, for flaws, deceptions. Any of those things that Harry’s always been so good at, underneath those easy-going smiles and polite words. “I’ll let you know,” he says. He wonders what he can get from Harry, what Harry will let him take, what Harry would willingly give up. He turns to look at the cathedral again and although there’s a girl there with a cloud of blonde hair laughing with her friend she barely reminds him of Perrie at all. Everything is unfamiliar for a moment, and he is disjointed. Even Harry next to him is someone he has barely known for years.

“Do you remember my wedding?” he asks abruptly, and Harry nods, something guarded in his eyes. It was a good day. Summer, and the sun was out, the sky was clear and bright. Perrie was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, her skin covered in pale lace that he fumbled to slide off her later that night, her fingernails purple and pointed as they scraped over his back. They had a party in their back garden, fairy lights strung up, music blaring until late. He remembers Eleanor and Louis kissing like they’d never stop in the corner, he remembers Liam and Niall challenging each other to a dance off. He doesn’t remember Harry there at all. “Why did you leave early?” he says.

“I stayed for the speeches,” Harry points out. “I stayed to watch you cut the cake.”

“Yeah, but after that.”

Harry frowns, shrugs. It looks awkward, but some days he makes everything awkward. Sometimes he makes awkward into the most graceful thing Zayn’s ever seen. “Why’d you think?” he says, and brushes by Zayn as he strides back into the main square. “Let’s go and get a beer,” he suggests, and like always, Zayn follows him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading this! Any comments/concrit are hiiiighly appreciated. Also, come and say hi to me on twitter (foracorkscrew) or tumblr (flomps). Hooray!


End file.
